Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

• Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
• Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
• Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
• The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
• The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
• John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
• ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes…

Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Dr. Anita Sengupta, a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and since this interview was recorded now a Senior Vice President at Hyperloop One). They geek out talking about space exploration as well as the important topic of diversity:

• YOW! West keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration” and AATC 2017 keynote “Engineering the Red Planet“
• 7 Minutes of Terror: The Challenges of Getting to Mars
• When you are doing something for the first time, you have to come up with out of the box solutions – first you need to make it work, and then you need to make it last
• The biggest issue is to get enough people into the pipeline from under-represented groups, one thing we can do is more public outreach at the school level
• You come…

Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Rebecca Parsons, the Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks and the co-author of “Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change” and chat about the following:

• Rebecca’s keynote talk at YOW! “The Past and Future of Evolutionary Architecture“
• Evolutionary Architecture is the next stage on applying Agile practices to software development at the systems level and be able to respond to changes in the environment that affect the architecture
• Need to determine for your system what constitutes good, fitness functions are the documentation and tests to ensure your system meets those characteristics
• Need to move the needle on architecture, need to develop tools and techniques to decompose the role
• Agile Alliance is looking at what it means to truly be an international organisation (there are now affiliates in Brazil and New Zealand), expanding conferences from…

Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

• Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“
• Context-Driven Testing
• Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing
• Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing
• Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing
• Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test
• Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach
• Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve
• Sydney Testers Meetup
• Speak Easy – Speak Easy…